Amdocs, Linux Foundation to accelerate service provider, developer adoption of open source ECOMP

The Linux Foundation is hosting a new project that will make ECOMP open source available to service providers and cloud developers in 2017.

Amdocs and the Linux Foundation have struck up a partnership in an effort to accelerate adoption of the open source Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform developed by AT&T.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, this new project will make ECOMP open source available to service providers and cloud developers in 2017.

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Under the terms of the agreement, Amdocs will provide software development capabilities and industry expertise to drive industry adoption of OpenECOMP.

“These software-driven networks will allow carriers to be much quicker with new service introduction and provide an improved connectivity and service experience to their customers," said Gary Miles, chief marketing officer at Amdocs, in a release. "Having co-developed important modules to be contributed to OpenECOMP, we are in a position to help customers achieve an early advantage in leveraging OpenECOMP for service innovation."

During the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month, Amdocs will be showcasing a wide range of virtualized services from its NFV partner ecosystem.

Partner alignment

Being able to advance ECOMP into the broader user community is important for Amdocs, particularly as the vendor positions itself as an integrator to help service providers take advantage of the emerging standard and the migration to a software-centric network architecture.

Amdocs previously announced that it was tapped by AT&T to serve as the integrator to help other service providers and enterprises that want to take advantage of the telco’s ECOMP virtualization platform to build software-centric services.

Through that agreement Amdocs will help companies deploy that open source software into their own networks. While AT&T will likely continue to name other integrator partners, having this initial stamp of approval puts Amdocs in a prime position to help the telco and others with their software network transitions.

The value for service providers is that Amdocs and AT&T and can create a single view of physical and virtual resources and services, rapid service design, master service orchestration and automated configuration and management.

Chris Rice, SVP of Domain 2.0 architecture and design at AT&T Labs, told FierceTelecom in a previous interview that while the majority of its activity has been with service providers, “we have also had a number of discussions with integrators.”

Carrier momentum grows

Service provider interest in ECOMP continues to ramp. In July, AT&T revealed plans to build a global community around ECOMP by working with the Linux Foundation as the host for this open source initiative.

ECOMP enables service providers to quickly add features and cut operations costs. It gives service providers and businesses anywhere more control of their network services and enables developers to create new services.

Since announcing its alliance with the Linux Foundation, Bell Canada and Orange have pledged support for AT&T’s standard.

Bell Canada confirmed in December that it is testing ECOMP with the aim of creating and managing software-defined networks. While Bell has not revealed any specific plans on how it would use ECOMP, the service provider could implement the technology to quickly add features and drive down operations costs on its FTTH rollout and for IP-based cloud service expansions, for example.

Likewise, Orange Labs Network said it plans “to start experiments with ECOMP firstly in a lab environment, to be followed by a field trial as part of our On-Demand Networks program.”

Gaining interest from these service providers that have the scale of Bell Canada and Orange are key validation points that AT&T, Amdocs and the open source community need in order to drive further acceptance of the ECOMP standard.